Star Wars: The Skywalker Heresy: The Infamous Christmas Special
by trekaddict
Summary: Oneshot. During the Battle of Endor, Darth Vader has a choice to make, and is confronted by what could have been... My look at what that might look like.


**Now, it wouldn't be Star Wars without one, now wouldn't it? That being said, I haven't decided yet for certain if a scene of this form will ever be part of the story. So therefore, don't assume that everything written in here is going to actually appear in the main narrative.**

**The infamous Christmas Special**

As the battle between the Empire and the Alliance fleet raged in and around the Second Death Star and on Endor's surface, events came to a head in the Emperor's throne room. Vader watched as his so-called master tried to turn Luke, but Vader had known that it was not going to work even before his son had taken up the sabre to fight. What Palpatine seemed to have forgotten in the years since Order 66 was that the ways of the Jedi, however naïve they might be, also tended to give adherents that really believed in them a sort of moral strength that went far beyond anything the dark side of the Force could present, and for all his lack of proper training, Luke Skywalker was such a believer. The boy was a beacon of light in the Force that Vader hadn't seen since... since that fateful morning after the Temple Boming during the Clone Wars.

In the very, very rare moments of self-reflection he allowed himself once every year or so, he had come to the conclusion that this had been the moment he had started to loose faith. Not Luke. Most others Vader knew or had known would have lost faith during that duel in the bowels of Bespin, but none of his children had. At that, he shuddered. He would never forgive himself for what he had done to Leia. He may not have known then that she was his daughter, but he had had her tortured, he had destroyed her home, he had taken away the man she loved... No, he wouldn't blame her if she never forgave him. She did take after her mother like that.

And once more he felt the stab of pain he always felt when thinking of his late wife, but unlike every other time in the last two decades he did not shove the pain away, but instead let it run full force. But right now, he had more important things to do. Luke needed to live, and to do that...

Vader made a single step, but instead of it taking him towards the Emperor, he stepped into... something. It was not a room like anything he'd seen before, but more that everything but himself was replaced with whiteness. Everything was gone, Luke, the Emperor, the Death Star, the two battling fleets outside, even the pain..

He looked down and saw that though he was still wearing his suit and still felt the constant ache from his damaged lungs, his body was whole again and his suit seemed to be undamaged. Vader turned around, but there was only more white. White everywhere.

"It took you a while to get here, my former apprentice."

Vader whirled around, and there he saw the figure that belonged to the voice that he'd recognize anywhere, at any time. Obi Wan looked like when they had duelled on Mustafar, except that Obi Wan seemed to be more the light-hearted man he had been before the Clone Wars. "You have let yourself go a bit, haven't you Anakin?"

"Who are you?"

"I keep forgetting that you aren't aware of Master Yoda's technique. Luke accepted this almost immediately, but I suppose you have spent too much time with the Dark Side for you to be as accepting of the new and unexplained as your son."

Somewhere in the back of his head Vader remembered the dreams he'd had the first few years after the fall of the Republic, and he began to believe that the figure in front of him really was his old Master. "Where are we? Dead?"

Obi Wan grinned. "I am. You... no. Not yet at any rate. And before you start asking questions [I]again[/I], I will give you some of the answers you want. Long story short, we are aware of the conflict within you, and we decided to show you what could have been."

With that, Obi Wan disappeared, leaving Vader alone. But not for long. Seconds later, the scene resolved itself into some sort of settlement, and judging by the single sun, at about mid-day. It was a modest little down, no more than maybe ten-thousand inhabitants, but Vader had to admit, it seemed one of the more prosperous and ordered colonies he'd seen. The only problem was that there seemed to be no people around. Except... but that was impossible. The Force signature was familiar yet very different, but then, even Dark Lords of the Sith rarely felt their own.

Vader began to run. He ran through empty, but clean and well-maintained paved streets lined with modest residential dwellings into an area where small repair shops and other low-level commercial and industrial ventures were. Eventually he left the town and reached a rift in the ground that contained not only a startlingly beautiful waterfall and corresponding river that ran very, very deep, but also... himself. Vader didn't know if the apparition of the Force really was him, a part of him or an imposter. The other Skywalker on the other hand... he was bent over a battlescarred and heavily modified yellow and grey ETA-2 Interceptor that Vader instinctively knew as the one he'd been allocated in the short time between the Battle of Coruscant and Order 66, which he'd never gotten around to flying.

The figure turned, and for what had to be no more than a minute or two but felt like hours, Vader inspected the other him. Like him, a man in his mid-fourties, but in eminently better shape. Not scarred by either Force or Fire, with all but one of his limbs intact, plain and simple, the man Vader knew he'd be had he defeated Obi Wan during their duel. Except... he tentatively, almost shyly reached out and sensed nothing of the Dark Side in his counterpart. It was not what he would have expected, it wasn't the old sort of Light Side, but something else entirely.

"Obi Wan told me you'd be coming. I liked the Old Man better before he found his sense of humour. I was just about to go into a Council Meeting." He tilted his head, and Vader got the vague sense that the other knew at least in a broad sense what had been going on in the so-called real world. "But I suppose you haven't been in any meetings of the High Council for a very long time, given what you did to your Jedi Order."

"I did what I thought was right." Vader replied. "And what's it to you?"

"Well," the Other said, "I'm Anakin Skywalker, so in a way, what you could have been if what I was told is correct."

"There hasn't been any Anakin Skywalker in decades. You are not. Real."

Anakin shrugged. "You aren't any more real than I am, Vader. I think our two... realities are just one of many facets of the same Multi-verse, with the chief difference being, that I didn't fall for Palpatine's tricks and did not slaughter my fellow Jedi."

Vader was stunned, yet he inspected this version of who he had been closer. And somewhere in the back of his mind a question wanted to be asked ever more insistently, one that he had forbidden himself from even thinking about until he had discovered Luke's existence. It was a question that the other Anakin would understand only too well. The first question any conceivable and recognizeable version of Anakin Skywalker would ask.

"Did... did you save her?"

Understanding, regret and pity became visible on Anakin's face. "I did."

Relief and regret flooded Vader, and it got only worse when he heard what Anakin had to say next. "But if your world was anything like mine, she was never really in danger to begin with. Palpatine wanted to use our worry about Padmé to turn us to the Dark Side. With you it seems to have worked, and all too well at that, given what your Obi Wan told me."

There was no judgement in those eyes, Vader noted, even for what had happened on Mustafar.

"You fought him? Defeated him?" Vader couldn't help asking, almost desperately.

Anakin shook his head. "Fought him, yes. Defeated, not yet. But we managed to evacuate the core of the Order from Coruscant during Order 66, if that's what you're wondering. The [I]twins[/I] were born on the ship. No complications, but it Leia has inherited her mother's stubbornness as well as ours. She insisted on being first. Ahsoka swears that she's just like me in that regard, though I have no idea what she's talking about."

Vader smiled as much as he could under his mask. Even after all this time he could hear the voice of his old Padawan in his head saying those words. He looked back up at Anakin. "So you found her?"

Anakin laughed. "Oh no. That would be too common. She ended up finding me after she got tangled up in Palpatine's backup plan."

Thinking back over the years, Vader could indeed remember having read vague mentions in various classified files of various ideas Palpatine must have entertained before the rise of Darth Vader, and it seemed that some form of that must have touched Ahsoka Tano's existence after she left the Order.

"She's back with us, luckily. My children would never forgive me if they were without their favourite aunt, and Padmé would not be amused either."

And there was one more thing that Vader envied Anakin for. Family, friends, love.

"How does the Order feel about that?"

With a snort, Anakin slammed the maintenance hatch he'd been working on closed. "To be honest, they weren't happy at first, and it took a few years before everyone accepted the changes. Olin likely still believes I got rewarded for breaking the code. In the end, it seems to have worked out for the best. What you see here" he said, and motioned back towards the town, "isn't just the Order, but many of those we managed to save from the Empire. Here they have a tiny piece of the Republic to live in, one where they aren't hunted for who or what they are."

Vader didn't really believe what he'd heard, even though he really wanted to. The Order that had been so ossified that they'd run into their doom with seeing eyes changing like that? Allowing [I]attachements[/I]? He shook his head. No, this -

"You know," Anakin interrupted, "if I was you I wouldn't believe it either, and trust me, what little of the Council survived the Exodus took their blasted time to extend that to anyone beyond me and our wife. I think Mace still isn't too happy with it, but he seems to have resigned himself. Yoda on the other hand... he still says that he decided on at least some change the moment I confessed everything to the Council."

Something inside Vader snapped when he heard those wonderful yet impossible words. There was only one thing he wanted from this counterpart of his. In the depth of his heart he needed this. He knew what would happen, what he had to do and what would happen to him in doing it once he got back, and he could do this without any regrets at all if he did this now.

Anakin it seemed had caught on to it. "Come on, it's not far. After all, we control this vision together."

Vader let himself be led through the settlement, only now wondering if any of it was real.

"It's real enough where I come from." Anakin said without prompting, "The Order has spent the time since the Exodus here. My children grew up here."

Suddenly, the entire town was populated. The people were, if not rich, then they seemed to be content, even happy. The fields they had walked through were teeming with various crops and as they crested a hill, he could even see a few farms with Nerfs at the foot of a hill that was topped by a massive end-station for a geo-thermal power plant that presumably was someplace else. What amazed Vader the most was that now and then he could see beings of all ages who were clearly Jedi, going by their bearing and that they openly carried lightsabres, walking among the others, and that while they all seemed not to see him, greeted Anakin as one of their own, with respect that was normally only due a Master of considerable rank and respect. At several occasions he could see younglings and Padawans who seemed to be out and about with their parents, and deep in his heart he envied them for that.

Vader almost stumbled over his own two feet when he saw someone else yelling out to Anakin. She was at least an order of magnitude taller than when he'd last seen her, maybe two. Her head-tails and Montrals were each considerably longer too, and Vader had difficulties connecting the tall, confident and obviously very powerful Jedi with the almost.-still-a-youngling Ahsoka Tano had been when she'd stepped off that ship during the Clone Wars. He was far too busy looking at his...this version of his former Padawan to listen what the two were talking about, and he had one more regret, never having tried to discover what had happened to her. He was confident that she had survived the purges, but after that... Clearly in this world the Order had been made to see reason.

But knowing that at least one version of Ahsoka was where she was supposed to be gave him a sense of peace.

It wasn't too long after that that they turned a corner, and to Vader, his surroundings just seemed to float away.

Even twenty years older, Padmé was still as beautiful as he remembered her, and as much as he wanted to reach out to her, he knew that this was not the same as he had lost. He watched as Anakin walked over to her, and when their words came to him only as a low murmur, Vader realized that his time in this near-paradise was coming to an end.

Slowly the scene dissolved and turned back into the throne room of the Death Star. He was close to returning when decided that what he had been about to do was the right thing. It was the one thing he could do to redeem himself, and he would gladly bear the consequences for it.

Once more, Luke was on the ground, being slowly killed by Palpatine's Force lightning. Vader stepped forward.

**Finis (of the special that is)**


End file.
